Wayland. It comes up a lot: “Bug X fixed in the Plasma Wayland session.” “The Plasma Wayland session has now gained support for feature Y.” And it’s in the news quite a bit lately with the announcement that Fedora KDE is proposing to drop the Plasma X11 session for version 40 and only ship the Plasma Wayland session. I’ve read a lot of nervousness and fear about it lately. So today, let’s talk about it!
Wayland+Plasma 5.27 feel pretty close to usable, so I’m hopeful that with Plasma 6 I can finally just pick Wayland and stick with it and not have to back to X11.
(With my usage and a NVIDIA card)
If Nate thinks that wayland only on Plasma 6 is the way to go then I feel like we as a user should trust him.
Currently I use AMD hardware and for me KDE + Wayland is fantastic experience. Some crashes here and there, with which I’m fine with.
My brother is running Fedora Kinoite + Wayland with Nvidia and he is total noob when it comes to Linux. He is happy and never complained about his system.
So, I would only assume for normal use case wayland is already in good shape currently. It is only going to get better with plasma 6.
Fedora 40 is still 7 months away.
Well… that is not what he is saying. X11 will be supported for a long time still. In fact KDE has not even set a deadline for ending support for X11*. It will definitely not end with the release of Plasma 6.
The point is that not adapting software to Wayland is a mistake. It may be a pain, but X11 is virtually abandonware. The developers have moved on (to Wayland) and there are no new versions coming out – unless someone forks it, of course, but that would probably be another mistake, as the codebase is an unsustainable mess.
This implies that, yes, when most software projects have got their applications working on Wayland, X11 will be phased out as a platform Plasma works on, but there is no date for that yet.
– * Other projects are less coy. Fedora is considering removing support X11 from their very soon, maybe in their next releases. This is what sparked the discussion. Not KDE.